Falling asleep at the wheel while driving isn’t uncommon and incidents like these have led to accidents world-wide long since human kind began to imagine that sleep deprivation and driving do not go hand in hand. Incidentally, they do, and driving while sleepy can lead to severe consequences, endangering your life and that of others around you. Plessey Semiconductors and a team of researchers at Nottingham Trent University are currently working on a feasible way to prevent occurrences like these from happening.
Together, the folks behind it all have developed a system that uses capacitive sensors mounted in a driver’s seat to unobtrusively measure the occupant’s cardiac signals. As the driver’s heart-rate begins to fall, the car quickly senses that the driver is sleepy and begins sounding an alert. If the alert is ignored, the car begins using systems like cruise control and lane departure systems to guide the car safely away from the road, to a stand-still! The Technology Strategy Board has funded this project with approximately $151,046!